Holding onto something slipping away: the work of Paddy Summerfield

April 28, 2018

"...I wanted to hold onto something slipping away..."

Paddy Summerfield

Perhaps this is the same reason why I have photographed my own parents too, over the years, for the work in my current exhibition, 'From a Small Island currently on at the Midland Arts Centre until July 8th.

Indeed, for me, Summerfield's work has been both motivating and inspiring over that time.

It's no surprise then that I have written about this work before on my blog. It was a pleasure then, that after one blog post, several years ago, Mr Summerfield sent me an email - which so kind of him.

Well, here's what Sean O’Hagen thinks about the work in The Guardian -

"Mother and Father is an act of remembrance, deeply personal and acutely observational. It is also a reminder of the power of a certain kind of photographic attentiveness that has become increasingly hard to find in an age of manipulated image-making. Paddy Summerfield’s black-and-white images, taken in the expansive, well-tended garden of his parents’ house in Oxford and on a family holiday in north Wales, span the years 1997 to 2007. During that time, he tells us: “I recorded my mother’s loss of the world, my father’s loss of his wife and, eventually, my loss of them both.”